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1/ 'Modern ads typically work to obscure labor. Commercials banish the drudgery of work in favor of the pure sensuality of consumption. In her 1983 documentary, “A Sign Is a Fine Investment,” Judith Williamson traced how the advertising industry, which once highlighted images of
2/ manufacturing & industry, shifted to a landscape where products “miraculously appear out of the sky.” The coronavirus ads mark a return to grit. They show cranes valiantly lifting cargo onto FedEx planes, slo-mo clips of Fareway workers striding through stockrooms, & packages
3/ racing down Amazon conveyor belts. These ads smartly capitalize on the trend of anointing all essential workers as heroes. Over the strains of David Bowie’s “Heroes,” Doug McMillon, CEO of Walmart, speaks as the faces of his company’s associates appear: “Thank you for keeping
4/ us safe, and for being our light.” An Amazon ad, “Delivering Rainbows,” spins delivering packages during the pandemic into a twee, heartwarming pursuit. The well-meaning impulse to thank these workers has been seized by employers as a tactic for papering over the risks of
5/ working in warehouses and grocery stores, and easing our own tensions around benefiting from such work. The ads reveal the labor process and hide it at once. “I have a problem with all this hero talk,” Karleigh Frisbie Brogan, a Trader Joe’s employee, wrote in The Atlantic.
6/ “It’s a pernicious label perpetuated by those who wish to gain something — money, goods, a clean conscience — from my jeopardization.” https://nyti.ms/3gdrCOy
